Unrealistic Black Hole

It won't destroy the world, but it still sucks.

Beavis: Hey, Butthead. What is a black hole?
Butt-Head: So like, a black hole is like, this giant bunghole in outer space. It's like, it sucks up the whole universe, and then it's like, it grinds it up and sends it all to Hell or something.

— Beavis and Butt-Head, while watching the music video for "Black Hole Sun"

Black holes. They're the most terrifying things in the known universe. They're huge masses of... well, nothing (but they do have a lot of mass); and nothing, not even light, can travel fast enough to escape them. ^note  A black hole is any object which has an escape velocity that is greater than the speed of light. The event horizon (or Schwarzschild radius) is the boundary within which this condition is met. Unfortunate items which do fall in are spaghettified (the official scientific term), stretched thin by tidal forces, the black hole ripping individual molecules apart. But that's only if you get too close. From far away enough, in a stable orbit, being near a black hole would just be the same as orbiting a massive, invisible ^note  The gravitational lensing effect is hard to overlook so the black hole would appear as a silhouette against the stars — see the Other Wiki for a simulation thereof. And then Hawking's radiation would actually make the thing pretty bright. star, only the black hole would be much smaller. ^note  For a nice size comparison, see this video; a black hole with Earth's mass would be about the size of a coin. For example, if the sun were to suddenly be magically converted into a black hole of the same mass, Earth's orbit would continue on exactly as before, completely unaffected (gravitationally, that is — the lack of heat and light would, of course, rapidly end almost all life).

Even orbiting a black hole wouldn't be a safe place for organic lifeforms, as you would be constantly pelted with orbiting dust and debris flying at ludicrous speeds, all while simultaneously being cooked alive and having your DNA melted by the incredible temperatures and intense emissions of radiation, including X-rays and Gamma rays. Needless to say, black holes are pretty scary things. Scary, yet deeply fascinating and mystifying things, as well as objects for which there's many discoveries still to be made, and much research yet to be conducted. At least they have a rather well defined list of things they can and can't do.

... Unless it's fiction. Sometimes they just suck in everything around them like giant space-vacuum-cleaners, seeing as Gravity Sucks. This can range from whole planets to just the Big Bad of the story (and in those cases, the black hole conveniently closes after swallowing him). Also commonly, a black hole will be represented as an actual hole in space and it will be perfectly possible to enter a black hole and leave it safely. Sometimes a black hole will be completely flat, apparently forgetting that our universe is 3D. Relativistic time dilation tends to be ignored; a character voyaging into a black hole can leave it without time warping, while those outside can see things enter a black hole without slowing to a crawl.^note To an external observer, anyone or anything entering the event horizon would cease moving, then slowly fade away, as the last of the light reflecting off them is then red-shifted to invisibility over a long period of time. If a black hole is created artificially on a planet, perhaps for use as a weapon, expect to see it hovering above the surface rather than boring a hole in its crust and tearing the planet apart from the inside. Also, if a black hole forms during the story, expect its gravitational pull to instantly skyrocket instead of remaining the same as the pull of the star that collapsed to form it. Of course it will be completely insane for anything to be orbiting it, despite the fact that we are orbiting a black hole right now.

A subtrope of Space Is Magic — indeed, if the canon in question has magic then that's your Hand Wave for getting away with this trope. For two similar, more terrestrial examples, see Do Not Touch the Funnel Cloud and Quicksand Sucks; in the case of the latter, it too is often depicted as actively suctioning things into itself, when in reality the pulling power of both black holes and quicksand works around the force of gravity instead. When the black hole is used as a method of travel, see Our Wormholes Are Different. Very commonly used as a Negative Space Wedgie. Often involved in a Spaceship Slingshot Stunt.

Note that for decades, the exact appearance of a black hole was solely a theoretical and artistic undertaking, constantly changing and shifting in line with the emergence of new scientific theories and shifting schools of thought. On April 10, 2019, the first ever image of a black hole was released to the public. It was undertaken by the Event Horizon Telescope and a globally collaborative scientific undertaking by multiple universities across the world. This was followed up by the May 12, 2022 release of a photograph of Sagittarius A* in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way galaxy, showing that it too contains a black hole.

noreallife

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In DieBuster a giant space monster managed to absorb the black hole he was trapped in and turn it into a weapon. When the heroes destroyed him, they accidentally split the black hole in half, almost causing a new Big Bang. They managed to save the day, in a way that even one of characters admitted is beyond human's understanding.
• Gildarts from Fairy Tail actually crushed a black hole that Bluenote brought into existence. Justified in that Gildarts, Bluenote, and all major characters are magic users and Gildarts specific magic "Crush" is quite literally defined as the ability to destroy anything, particularly other magic spells.
• Hilariously enough, the original series, GunBuster, was actually a lot better with this than most modern depictions: when the aforementioned black hole is spontaneously created in the midst of an enemy fleet, the animation depicting it is fairly accurate: the accretion disc is the only visible part of the thing, which otherwise looks like a giant spherical void, complete with particle discharges from the poles. And the gravitational effects of having a black hole only a few hundred AU's from Earth are touched upon. There's still the idea that an overloaded spaceship engine could create a black hole in the first place, but this series also has Inazuma Kicks, so...
• Heroic Age: Black holes do not look like giant tornadoes in space! And you certainly cannot punch them out of existence, no matter how powerful you are. The effects were nonetheless very awesome.
• Inuyasha has Miroku, who has a uni-directional black hole (in his palm!) which he can control by using magic beads and a strip of cloth. It's capable of absorbing any size of enemy (or object) yet won't absorb Miroku yet.
• Jujutsu Kaisen has Yuki Tsukumo, whose ability allows her to add imaginary mass to her own body. Funtionally, this means she can deliver an incredible Megaton Punch and renders her untargetable by techniques and ability that target a person or individual because her absurd mass makes her register her like an innanimate object instead of a person. Of course this comes with the passive ability for her body to ignore the effects of this mass she's adding, meaning she isn't bogged down by the huge amount of weight nor does she interact normally with the Square-Cube Law... but this passive ability only works up to a limit. However, there isn't a limit to how much mass she can add her Dangerous Forbidden Technique involves adding mass infinitely, overflowing her body's ability to ignore it, but causing her to collapse into a black hole. That being said, the singularity she creates is quite a bit more realistic than most featured in this article, and preventing it from destroying the world is only possible due to her own force of will limiting it and the fact that she used inside of a barrier.
• Reborn! (2004) has Kozato Enma, who can create stars and black holes at will as part of his Earth Flames. Tsuna can still fly past the black holes and blow it up. In addition, the black holes never affect anyone not involved in the fight; observers can stay in the same room as one and not be spaghettified; if the series used realistic black holes the whole planet Earth would be as dead as it's possible to get the instant one showed up.
• Rebuild World: The protagonist Akira eventually gets his hands on illegal Antimatter rounds that cause a singularity, which sucks up surrounding mist into a sphere and then explodes outwards. The artificial mist in question has Gravity Screw effects designed to slow down bullets and reduce Collateral Damage.
• The Sailor Moon Super S movie had the titular black dream hole. Which was spherical. And the inside was apparently made of webbing.
• In Voltron, the Omega Comet "looks like a comet, but it acts like a black hole." It's a big rock with enormous gravity.

Comic Books

• In a 70s Green Lantern story, Oa was threatened by a black hole, apparently moving rather quickly, drawn like a two-dimensional object, and collapsed by an ancient alien, ending the threat.
• In a modern DC comic, an alien drops a very small virtual (gravity but not mass) black hole before leaving the Earth. That would mean the end of the whole planet, if not for Superman grabbing it and keeping it contained in his fist until the virtual gravity ceases and the black hole dissolves.
• In an old Firestorm (DC Comics) comic, a giant named Brimstone is trapped in the center of the sun, and his presence creates a black hole. Firestorm, at this point Dr. Martin Stein a lone fire elemental, closes the black hole by shoving Brimstone through it, but gets sucked up himself. He winds up emerging from a White Hole in a parallel universe, and resolves to spend his time exploring the place. Comics, everybody!
• The premise of Rogue Trooper depends on this - Nu Earth is situated next to a black hole through which both the Norts and Southers want to be able to send their ships.
• In Final Crisis, Darkseid's fall to Earth causes it to drift toward a black hole. The Green Lantern Corps have to push their power to the limit to reach Earth in time, but manage to pull Earth away just in time. Also Darkseid apparently has a black hole where his heart should be. His very existence is actually dragging the entire Multiverse into the black hole. Fortunately for plausibility, the black hole in Darkseid's chest is justified due to him being a god and therefore above such pesky things as physics.
• Towards the end of Shakara, the title character rigs the Museum of War to trap the Big Bad's soldiers that pursue him. The weapons he use are black hole bombs, each of which creates a black hole about the size of a basketball when it detonates, and immediately sucks up his pursuers.
• There's a comic in Star Wars (Marvel 1977) which involves the Millennium Falcon, piloted by Luke, playing chicken with a Star Destroyer and a black hole and managing, through the Force, to take subtle maneuvers at the very edge of their personal event horizon. The Star Destroyer tries to follow the maneuver and doesn't manage.
• X-Men:
  • Xorn was very bad about this. Supposedly his head was a black hole, and the only thing keeping it in place was a strange metal helmet. The prospect of taking off his helmet was considered incredibly dangerous, never mind the fact that it would only be dangerous to anything very close to his head. It's even worse in the Ultimate universe where he (or Zorn, it's hard to keep them apart) simply explodes into a disproportionately large black hole that magically begins to suck up everything within a few dozen miles. It gets even worse when his brother supposedly turns into the opposite of a black hole: a star^*A black hole is the fate of any large star. The true opposite of a black hole would be a white hole, which would, theoretically, push away all mass..
  • In the case of Ultimate Marvel, Xorn represents illumination which is the opposite of a black hole's devouring of light. It represents their conflicting philosophies and not stars and black holes themselves. The visual representation of Zorn's black hole can also be attributed to the artist.
  • The writer who originally defined Xorn's powers did so in the context that they were entirely made up by Magneto, who was subsequently disappointed that the X-Men hadn't realised it was total nonsense.
• Chester P. Runk aka Chunk, a 1990s The Flash Anti-Villain was a "Human Black Hole". He apparently had total control of whether he absorbed things, as long as he kept absorbing something. Everything he absorbed, including people who annoyed him, was sent, unharmed, to another dimension. If he didn't absorb enough material, he would "implode" ... and also end up, unharmed in the other dimension.
• During Walt Simonson's run on Fantastic Four, the FF, along with The Mighty Thor and Iron Man, time-travelled to the mid 21st century where the Black Celestial had built a weapon to destroy all reality so he could recreate the universe in his image. It turns out that his weapon was Galactus; he had somehow amplified his hunger for planets to the point where Galactus converted himself into a giant black hole which would, in time, suck up all matter in the universe, from all points of time, leading to a Class X-4 Apocalypse How, possibly bordering on Class Z. As this alternate future was encased in a time bubble, Galactus was able to eliminate this time line from happening by deploying the Ultimate Nullifier.
• Sleeper (WildStorm) shows us a "A suitcase black-hole bomb".
• In Blackstar, the eponymous villain is able to form -typically two-dimensional- black holes in mid-air which she uses as a weapon to try to crush or tear Supergirl apart.
• One memorable Italian Disney story, which was pretty crazy even by comic book standards, had Scrooge attempt to solve the waste management crisis by dumping garbage into a black hole. He has all the world's garbage accumulated in a single landfill, to be loaded into a massive rocket... but the combined weight destabilizes the Earth's orbit and sends the planet spiraling into interstellar depths and straight for the black hole. The garbage rocket (which is powered by gold for some reason - you could say they achieved gold fusion) is chained to the earth and launched as a counter-pull against gravity. The rocket pulls the planet when it's just fallen halfway into the black hole, but all it can do is keep it from falling further in. Does it not have enough power to counter a measly black hole? Oh, that's not the reason. It gets weirder. Scrooge and nephews explore the other side of the hole, and find that it's a parallel universe where the alternate Scrooge also attempted the garbage rocket plan, also ended up falling into the same black hole, and the alternate Earthlings are now also pulling from the other side with their own rocket with the exact same force. The situation is eventually solved when Scrooge and his alternate counterpart sacrifice the very last of their gold, which gives the two rockets enough power to pull both planets out, intact, simultaneously.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side: Suddenly, through forces not yet clearly understood, Darren Belsky's apartment became the center of a new black hole.
• Star Fox: A black hole was created when Andross sabotaged the device Fox McCloud Sr. was taking into the Asteroid Belt. The Black Hole sucked in fully a third of the Asteroid Belt, and remained in interplanetary space. Unlike real black holes, this one was fully visible as a purplish maelstrom in outer space, and it functions more-or-less as a Warp Zone to other locations in the Lylat system.

Fan Works

• Actually averted in the Star Trek Online fanfic A Changed World, which uses the gravitational redshifting and Time Dilation surrounding a black hole as plot points: a Bajoran starship and a Klingon battlecruiser are dragged 139 years into the future due to proximity to one, and the Distress Signal is distorted so badly by the black hole that it took that long for it to be detected by any passing ships. The stated mass and physical size of the black hole are also realistic.

Films — Animated

• BoBoiBoy: The Movie: Black holes are Bora Ra's superpower, yet they often appear as dark purple spheres that act like vortexes instead, causing objects to get sucked towards it or stuck orbiting around it. He can strengthen this ability by combining it with his giant hammer to trap BoBoiBoy in a black hole. That is until he breaks free, destroying his weapon in the process.
• Disney's Treasure Planet deals momentarily with a super nova going black hole. It's part of how they kill off Mr. Arrow (sadly, not to return). The RLS Legacy drifts partially into the emerging black hole, gets hit by the 'biggest magilla of them all', and rides the solar energy out of the black hole safely. And then there's an awesome shot of the accretion disk in the following scene. Which is... blue?

Films — Live-Action

• Godzilla vs. Megaguirus features the Dimension Tide, an orbital satellite that fires a small black hole at the earth in order to send Godzilla into another dimension. It doesn't work. Also somehow the three black holes they create just kinda disappear from existence without much fuss or well swallowing the entire planet. They also manage to create a wormhole that opens just in time to bring back an ancient bug for Godzilla to fight and then close up without any further mention.
• Star Trek (2009). Not only do characters travel through a black hole to another universe and another time, they escape its pull after they cross the event horizon (though they do have faster-than-light technology). It's really inconsistent, and makes you wonder why they researched all the science if they were going to ignore details at random. It's not as if Star Trek doesn't have plenty of swirly spacetime anomalies to pick and choose from anyway, so going with the relatively well-understood phenomenon of a black hole and systematically getting every detail about them wrong at various points was a little jarring. The black holes are also 2D, or very flat, and each surrounded by scary lightning, regardless of whether it's turning into a wormhole in that scene. Worse still, the planet Vulcan is consumed by a black hole… in minutes, not the near hour it would take at a minimum; completely, rather than forming an accretion disc; and without flooding the vicinity with enough X rays to vaporize every starship around, shields or no shields. It was made with Red Matter (and very small amounts of it too, for that matter), made by Vulcans for the purpose of creating a black hole to counteract a supernova. Forget about Accretion Disks, Event Horizons and General Relativity... things work differently when you have an intelligent alien race manufacturing black holes for their own purposes (then again, Romulans have been doing exactly that for decades, using tiny black holes to power their ships).
• Disney's The Black Hole is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, including a notable accretion disk that gives it the appearance of a swirly purplish hurricane. At the end the heroes fall through the hole and emerge, evidently, in another universe. Meanwhile, the bad guys end up in hell. Good ol' Nightmare Fuel for the kiddies. It's actually implied that they all died. The heroes ended up in Heaven, the baddies in Hell. And apparently the robots were sentient enough to have a soul. Granted that the robots in charge of the technical duties were not robots...
• The Giant Spider Invasion has the eponymous beasties arrive through a black hole that landed in a farmer's field. Without anything being sucked into it, natch. At the climax of the movie the black hole is saturated with neutrons and apparently neutralized, which causes all the spiders to burst into flames and ooze ice cream. Yes, it's a very bad movie.
• Event Horizon. The titular spacecraft featured and the "Hell-Drive". It used an ''artificial black hole" to do a gravity-based spacewarp that apparently takes you straight through the Warp. Touching the black hole, rather than tearing you to atoms, gets your hand stuck in "black hole goo", then pulls you bodily in before (somehow) spitting you back out (though the designer of the engine explicitly states it shouldn't have opened or been able to do that but hey, that's what happens when your ship turns into an Eldritch Abomination).
• The 2006 Syfy Channel Original Movie The Black Hole 2006 has one randomly open up in the middle of St. Louis; the protagonists have been messing around with physics is the only explanation. Also, its mass and stability are somehow directly linked to a transparent creature made of pure energy that came out of it when it appeared, and the only way to get rid of it is to drive the creature back into the hole. We don't get it either.
• The Dark Elves in Thor: The Dark World use small grenades that generate black holes, though the effect is very localized: Malekith tosses one at Odin's throne and the grenade destroys just the throne, not a spherical area centered on it. Furthermore, the spherical area would be way bigger than it's shown to be in other scenes.
• Interstellar averts most of the common pitfalls of relativity, Gravity Sucks, and so forth, and is to date one of the most accurate portrayals of a black hole in film, with even the graphical effects being based on equations written down by physicist (and executive producer) Kip Thorne. Everything that happens inside the black hole, however, is completely made-up, because scientists still have almost no idea what goes on inside.
• Zathura has a justified example. The titular Zathura is a black hole used as a reset button, and sucks up everything created by the game as the players kept on. It's justified because it's not a real black hole, but a creation of the magical board game.

Literature

• Justified in the Aeon 14 novel Destiny Lost. When the AST destroys the giant graviton generators that are keeping the brown dwarf-massed gas giant Aurora from collapsing and igniting (they're using it to generate helium-3 for fuel), the brown dwarf collapses, causing a massive fusion explosion that compresses the core below the Schwartzchild radius for its mass. The miniature nova also provides energy to keep open the portals to the dark layer through which the graviton generators pulled gravitons, which means the black hole begins absorbing dark matter as well as its immediate surroundings. Thus, it ends up with a larger mass and therefore larger gravitational pull than the object it formed from (the shift in the system's gravity pattern is mentioned to be causing earthquakes on inhabited planets in the system). The portals do close eventually: the P.O.V. Sequel novella Know Thy Enemy nails down the black hole's final size to about 1/10 of a solar mass—as well as stating that normal procedure in destroying a "fuel planet" is to destroy the graviton platforms in such a way that the explosion isn't evenly distributed enough to create a black hole (the admiral was trying to destroy the Intrepid along with the fuel planet and it Went Horribly Wrong).
• In Angel Station, all FTL-capable ships are built around captured black holes. Yes, there are actual ships that go out to look for small enough singularities and capture them using special clamps without somehow being torn apart by the tidal forces. Those black holes then allow ships to make jumps to other stars, while releasing deadly amounts of radiation in their wake (causing the government to impose a mandatory No Warping Zone around any inhabited planet or station).
• Animorphs:
  • The Ellimist Chronicles - Originally a winged alien who became the Last of His Kind, the Ellimist accidentally falls into a black hole and becomes one with the fabric of space and time, effectively becoming a god capable of bending the laws of reality such as changing the rotation of a prehistoric Earth to preserve future humanity from his alien enemy, Crayak. Then Crayak duplicates this feat and also becomes a god, battling the Ellimist for all eternity. In that case, that means ANYONE who ever falls into a black hole would become as powerful as the Ellimist and Crayak. In real life, while a person could break down and become one with the singularity (center) of a black hole, they would first be ripped apart by the gravitational forces of the event horizon. Getting pulled apart and broken down to the point that even your atoms will be split apart would mean you would have no sentience to merge your consciousness with space and time as the Ellimist and Crayak did, due to a phenomenon currently known to science as dying horribly. (It's implied that this was due to Ellimist at this point being composed of a cloud of small spaceships connected by Subspace Ansible, some of which didn't enter the event horizon, meaning he was able to experience being pulled into a black hole from the perspective of both subject and observer, resulting in a Reality-Breaking Paradox that caused him to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.)
  • Interestingly, in The Andalite Chronicles also has the protagonist get sucked into a black hole, though he manages to escape using the Time Matrix.
• Fred Saberhagen's Berserker short stories.
  • In "Masque of the Red Shift" Johann Karlsen takes a lifeboat into a black hole to lure a berserker ship to its doom.
  • In "The Temple of Mars" it turns out Karlsen went into orbit around the black hole within the event horizon, and in "The Face of the Deep" he's rescued from the black hole.
• The long-out-of-print novel Earth Ship and Star Song posits an FTL drive which involves creating a black hole around your ship to fling you into hyperspace (or whatever), then creating another black hole while you're inside the first one. The second black hole supposedly "eats" the first one and pops you back out into normal space. Um... yeah.
• In the novelization of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial by William Kotzwinkle, the eponymous alien is concerned that the higher gravity of Earth will cause his body to collapse into a black hole, which will then, in turn, swallow the earth and nearby planets. E.T. can safely be assured this is impossible. Justified in that, although E.T.'s species is probably advanced enough to know better, E.T. himself is a botanist. In any event, he is delirious and disoriented at the time.
• Joe Haldeman's novel The Forever War. Starships are able to travel hundreds of light years at a time by diving into collapsars (black holes). This is justified because Haldeman just made up the word "collapsars" to fit his book and then it suddenly became a real word to describe a type of black hole. Haldeman also has his characters suffer from time dilation due to traveling at relativistic speeds - the problems caused by this are part of why it's The Forever War.
• Mentioned by a villain in The Golden Oecumene, that due to the physics of the inside of a black hole, there is actually infinite space and computing power. It's never discovered if it's true or if it's blowing smoke.
• Christopher Stasheff's novel The Haunted Wizard has Matthew Mantrell order Maxwell's demon to create a quantum black hole (despite it having been proven impossible) and "drag it around the battlefield."
• Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth series generally treats black holes seriously, but there's a rather odd bit of pseudoscience in The End of the Matter, where a galaxy-sized "collapsar" (term likely borrowed from Haldeman) is neutralized by juxtaposing it with a similarly massive "expandar", or white hole, composed entirely of antimatter. Their respective gravitational fields suck material out of each other and mutually annihilate it. How this works is anyone's guess.
• In The Magicians, Josh can produce what he identifies as a black hole. Cartoonily, his target gazes stupidly at the hole for a second before getting sucked in. In the book's world, no wizard really understands how magic works...
• L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth "dekalogy" describes black holes as "suction whirlpools of magnetic force" that emit deadly amounts of gamma rays. The aliens harness small ones for use in power plants and to shunt their entire capital city Thirteen Minutes Out of Sync.
• Averted in The Planck Dive, by Greg Egan, which describes what it would be like to fall into a black hole (assuming you could survive).
• One of the Red Dwarf novels had an arc in which the crew encountered a black hole. Whether it's handled realistically or not is... really up to you: Its effect on time is addressed by the narrator (as well as causing numerous problems for ship computer Holly, what with his components being in different weeks), and the Talkie Toaster (really) describes the process of spaghettification. However, they then proceed to use the event horizon to slingshot out of the black hole. And find out quite quickly from Lister, who was left on a nearby planet, that the entire maneuver took decades. Being spaghettified isn't really presented correctly though; the point is the gravity stretches and compresses everything into one long thin "noodle", but in the book it's more like becoming multiple strands of spaghetti. And the crew remain conscious the whole time and are conveniently "de-spaghettified" once they've completed the slingshot, rather than being extremely dead.
• Patrick Moore's Scott Saunders Space Adventure novels are generally harder science fictions. However, in the novel Secret of the Black Hole the eponymous artificial black hole was at one point described as being "at most an inch" in diameter. A black hole of such size would have greater mass than Earth, yet the hole was still orbiting the Earth, rather than vice versa. The novel was written in the 1970s, when black holes were even less well understood than now.
• Timothy Zahn's Spinneret novel has an alien stardrive which is instantaneous, but made a lot less useful than one would think by the fact that it can only link together places in space where the gravitational fields from two nearby black holes cross. The ship flies right between the black holes and is somehow catapulted to its destination.
• In the Star Trek Expanded Universe novel Star Trek: Federation, both Kirk's and Picard's Enterprises enter something called a "subspace" black hole, which consists of three singularities orbiting each other at warp speed. Apparently, anything that enters it from any time period appears to exist there simultaneously, allowing the ships to meet (Kirk orders the all sensors to turn to their lowest resolution in order to avoid gleaning any hints of future technology, as per the Temporal Prime Directive). Kirk's Enterprise passes Zefram Cochrane's shuttle to Picard's ship, and both ships exit at their respective "time zones". Lampshaded in that Spock tells Kirk "I cannot pretend to understand how such a thing could possibly exist."
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In the New Jedi Order series, the Yuuzhan Vong ships actually created tiny black holes as shields (they exist just long enough to absorb incoming ordnance, then collapse). Even assuming you could do that, when you collapsed the singularity the destroyed ordnance would burst out as pure energy (which would be an enormously bigger explosion than whatever the weapon could have caused normally). The same creature/components that do this also propel the ships.
  • The Maw is a massive cluster of black holes. Theories abound that it was constructed, like a number of other unlikely celestial objects in the galaxy, to have been built by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. The Fate of the Jedi series reveals that the Maw was made by the Killik using Centerpoint Station, that its purpose was as a prison for an Eldritch Abomination, and that destroying Centerpoint station opened a gap in the prison.
  • Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor has all kinds of interesting things happening with black holes in Luke's visions, including a kind of Shapeshifter Showdown in which the Big Bad becomes a supermassive black hole and swallows Luke, who becomes a white fountain - the hypothetical anti-black-hole - to defeat him.

Live-Action TV

• The pilot episode of Andromeda did quite well in averting this trope until the very end, when they escaped using "Nova Bombs" to turn the black hole into a white hole. Then again, the Nova Bombs are never actually explained fully, only that they do some sort of magically scientific stuff to planets and/or stars, and their use on the black hole was a case of "What do we have to lose?" This is, after all, the same universe that has singularity cannons as semi-rare but completely viable technology, so super-future humans don't so much understand the laws of physics as have them written in pencil for whenever they feel like changing the rules. Then again, it's eventually revealed that the stars (and black holes) are alive. In fact, they're pissed at Hunt for blowing up one of their sisters. At this point, all the laws of physics can do is shrug and take a smoke break.
• In The Big Bang Theory, Stephen Hawking makes a joke to humiliate Sheldon, asking what he and black holes have in common. The punchline is "They both suck". Of course, this IS Stephen Hawking talking, so it's obvious he's just making a joke at the expense of one of his biggest (and definitely his most obnoxious) fans.
• Discussed in a Bones episode involving a murdered physicist who had worked on the Large Hadron Collider. Early in the episode the show references the mini-controversy over the LHC possibly producing black holes as a potential motive for the murder (the idea being that the victim was killed to prevent The End of the World as We Know It). First of all the story that originated this "controversy" was satirical to begin with, and second of all, the entire idea is physically impossible for multiple reasons.
• In Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a 2 part episode "Flight of the War Witch" has Buck and friends navigating a path through a "collapsar" to help people in another universe.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit" features a planet in a stable orbit around a black hole; in the show the orbit is only maintained due to the expenditure of great amounts of energy to cancel out the gravity of the black hole. In reality, objects can orbit black holes just as easily as they can orbit any other massive object (our entire galaxy orbits one). That said, the episode actually seems to depict a planet that's maintaining a stable orbit within a black hole's accretion disc without actually describing it as such. This should indeed be impossible without some fairly fancy tricks that are beyond physics as we understand it.
  • Averted in "World Enough and Time", which has an unusually accurate portrayal of the time dilation effect theorized to happen close to a black hole but not to the event horizon. A 400-mile-long colony ship is stuck with one end towards the black hole and positioned perpendicular to it, so that the place they arrive in is 400 miles closer to the black hole than the opposite end. When Bill is taken to the far end of the ship, a short delay at their arrival point before following her lasts ten years for Bill at the other end. She watches them from time to time on a monitor, their images apparently motionless because time is passing so slowly at their end.
• An episode of Eureka has miniature black holes popping up around town, then combining to form a large continually growing one for the climax. They somehow manage to be able to swallow whole buildings and pull cars through the air (implying they have more gravity and therefore more mass than the Earth) so where all that mass spontaneously appears from and why they don't yank the Earth out of its orbit is anyone's guess.
• In The Flash (2014), the Season 1 finale ends with Barry destroying a tiny black hole that threatened to consume the city by running around the accretion disk. Needless to say, this is not a strategy one should attempt or expect to work on actual black holes. Season 2 reveals that Barry's running around was merely slowing down the black hole's expansion. It took a Heroic Sacrifice from Ronnie, using Firestorm's energy, to collapse the black hole.
• On Heroes, a minor character named Stephen Canfield has the power to make Unrealistic Black Holes with his mind. He eventually kills himself by creating one and being sucked inside it.
• In Kamen Rider Build, all of the characters gain their superpowers from abstract concepts like rabbits, dragons, robots, crocodiles, etc. The Big Bad starts out using the powers of Cobra, but eventually upgrades to Black Hole, granting him the ability to teleport or create black holes that seem to only suck in the particular things he wants them to eat. Anything eaten by the black holes he creates increases his own power proportional to the mass consumed, but it takes about as much energy as he gets from eating one planet to travel to the next.
• Halfway through Lost in Space (2018) it's revealed that the planet they're stranded on is in a binary system and the 2nd star is a black hole. This acts as a looming threat for why they have to get off the planet immediately, because said black hole is "sucking" the planet out of orbit and tearing it apart in the process - so quickly that they have only days or weeks before the planet is uninhabitable. The only POSSIBLE way this would work is if it were a stray black hole flying through the system, not a binary system as they clearly stated, and even then it's happening WAY too fast. Any planet orbiting a star that collapses into a black hole will continue to orbit at its same distance because gravity doesn't change when a black hole forms. To make matters worse, their first hint it existed was that the "day was getting longer, too fast". A changing orbit would in no way change the day length, only rotational velocity or axial tilt, and they had no point of reference for how quickly seasons changed day length on this planet so had no basis to make such a claim.
• Odd Squad: This is a very common oddity in the world of the show. Sometimes they threaten the lives of agents and citizens, and other times they pose little to no threat, depending on the episode.
  • "Whatever Happened to Agent Oz?" has Oz accidentally use his Black-Hole-inator on the belief that it's his Handcuff-inator. He manages to create a blue-and-black-colored black hole with a small light at the end of it that begins to suck Octavia and Oz into it, but merely blows papers nearby around the room and its pull barely touches Oprah, who is sitting in her chair. Oscar is immune to the black hole itself and doesn't get sucked into its pull, and makes it disappear with (presumably) his Un-Black-Hole-inator gadget before casually walking out.
  • Oprah's office in and of itself also has a Black Hole Regulator, which is located behind a painting of her, as revealed in "Three's Company". This black hole doesn't suck anything in, and instead just blows wind onto O'Beth and Olympia. Whether this is due to the Regulator being broken or not isn't explained.
  • The climactic battle in the second half of the Season 2 finale, "Odds and Ends", has Ohlm creating the Black-Hole-inator using every single gadget in Precinct 13579's arsenal. It doesn't have the appearance of a regular black hole, and Oprah and Ohlm manage to resist its pull by the former sticking a pole into an air vent nearby and holding onto the latter's hand. Similarly, Oona is immune to the black hole's pull entirely via her Powered Armor, and Olympia and Otis also don't get sucked in, even when the latter uses his newfound Flight abilities to fly up and retrieve a gadget from the sphere of gadgets that powers the black hole.
  • The plot of "Box Trot" revolves around the Mobile Unit needing to throw the box of villain powers that The Shadow previously had into a black hole located on the other side of the town they're currently in. While the black hole, nor them throwing the box into it, isn't shown, considering the aforementioned listed black holes, it's safe to say that this black hole is also unrealistic.
• Red Dwarf once featured a "White Hole", which supposedly spewed out all the matter black holes sucked up…and the time too, which doesn't make a lick of sense. At the very least, you'd think it'd be physically impossible to drift into one.
• Space: 1999. Moonbase Alpha discovers a "black sun" in its path, but ends up passing safely through it and out the white hole on the other side, thanks to the intervention of a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. Some experimental shielding technology was involved, too.
• Stargate SG-1: The show both uses and partially averts this trope on a couple of occasions.
  • In "A Matter of Time", the Stargate connects to a planet falling into a black hole; the fact that time slows down near a black hole is used both as a plot point and for dramatic effect. The heroes must watch an unfortunate SG team on the doomed planet try to reach the gate – they keep running, but can never reach safety, as time slows to a crawl for them, and the 38 minutes the gate can stay open passes in only a few seconds from Stargate Command's perspective, barely long enough to get their badly redshifted authentication signal through. Carter also briefly nods toward real-life physics in that the time dilation effect is affecting a wider area than the black hole's gravity is, which is completely nonsensical (the time dilation and increased gravity are the same thing, you can't have one without the other), and she basically shrugs and admits "I have no idea how that's happening".
    • The real problem arises from the fact it's a newborn black hole that originated from one of the planet's binary suns. Gravity is a function of mass and distance between centers of mass. When a star collapses into a black hole the mass does not change, only the density, and neither does the distance between any orbiting planets and the star/black hole's center of mass. Therefor gravity at the planet's orbit would not change one iota, the planet would continue orbiting as normal and not "fall in", and there would be no time dilation. Gravity only "increases" once you get within the radius the star's surface used to encompass. Radiation would have been a MUCH more real problem.
  • In "New Order", the evil Replicators use a black hole's distortion of time and some Applied Phlebotinum to escape from its accretion disk (at least it was made clear they weren't trapped in the black hole itself!). As with everything in Stargate, moderately plausible science is liberally mixed with Rule of Cool, and black holes get to interact with Stargates (and nuclear weapons) in lots of interesting ways.
  • In "The Pegasus Project", the team combines a Stargate, Explodium, Technobabble, and a black hole to dial the Supergate and keep the Ori out of the Milky Way. Points for McKay telling Mitchell that it's not the black hole he's looking at, it's the accretion disk. Not that Mitchell cares.
    Mitchell: Which is cool.
  • Conversed in "200" after a particularly ludicrous use of this trope in the script for the Wormhole X-Treme! movie.
    Sam: "The singularity is about to explode"?
    Martin Lloyd: Yes?
    Sam: Everything about that statement is wrong.
    • To be fair, a black hole at the end of its life cycle can evaporate exponentially faster due to Hawking radiation, dissipating in a manner that might charitably be called "explosive".
• Star Trek: Voyager has the eponymous vessel, in its second episode enter a hole's event horizon, get trapped there, and then use a Dekiyon beam to widen a hole in said horizon in order to escape. For those who don't know, the event horizon is not a physical barrier, it's just a mathematical distance from the center of the black hole, and thus rather impossible to rip a hole in. However this was stated to be a quantum singularity, of which the rules may be different. Watch the episode for more information.
• Ultraman Dyna: One of the titular Ultra's finishing move is the Revolium Wave, which allows him to open a black hole to banish the Monster of the Week into, with the other side being a freezing, dimension of sub-zero degrees that instantly kills off whichever monster that opposes Dyna. And then there's the series finale itself, which sees Dyna/Asuka pulling a Heroic Sacrifice to tackle the Gransphere into a black hole, saving the universe in the process, although the hero survives and returns to the series a decade later.

Music

• Rush sends the Rocinante on a trip through one of these in the songs that make up "Cygnus X-1". "Book 1" from A Farewell to Kings has the ship flying in; it comes out halfway through "Book 2" from Hemispheres.
• In the song Into the Black Hole of Ayreon, the Migrator enters into the black hole located in the center of the quasar 3C 273. The next song has it travelling through a wormhole. located within the hole.
• The video of Black Hole Sun has no actual Black Hole, albeit some simulated gravity effects.
• The Blue Öyster Cult song Heavy Metal (Black and Silver) was inspired by a popular science work about the idea that black holes could be used as a means of faster-than-light travel. Inevitably it simplifies the science and takes liberties.

Pinball

• Unsurprisingly, Black Hole has one of these. You enter it for multiball.
• In Stern Pinball's Star Trek, getting enough Red Matter creates a black hole, which awards a random prize.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering has Naked Singularity which warps lands to produce other mana types.
• Exalted has one in the form of the Yozi Isidoros, the Black Boar that Twists the Skies, who is a sapient, boar shaped black hole who serves as the cosmic embodiment of unstoppable force and Heroic willpower.
• The Dungeons & Dragons has the "Sphere of Annihilation" which is claimed to be a literal hole in the multiverse. Anything that touches one is sucked in and destroyed completely, and if it was alive is rendered Deader than Dead. However, they only suck in solid things that touch them, leaving the air around them undisturbed. They also remain completely motionless floating in the air until somebody tries to move one, which can be done just by thinking about moving it, though it will always move towards anyone who tries to move it and fails.
  • The Spelljammer setting implies they are corpses of stellar dragons. The giant living spaceship, the Spelljammer, generates larger versions of the sphere as a weapon against other ships.
  • There are also some Spheres of Annihilation that are alive.
    • The Blackball or Umbral Blot is a living Sphere of Annihilation that has the ability to turn off its property of not affecting the air around it in order to vacuum enemies into itself.
    • The Elder Evil Pandorym, a monster powerful enough to kill all of the gods and destroy the world, has a body that acts like a larger than normal Sphere of Annihilation.

Video Games

• The "black holes" of Clu Clu Land are basically bottomless pits that double as mook makers. Bubbles cannot walk or swim over them without falling in and dying, and they constantly spawn hostile uniras, but you can have Bubbles safely pass these "black holes" but swinging her over one on a rotation pole. One gets the impression they are simply called "black holes" because they are holes that are black and blue, and the NES screen just ran out of space.
• Loop Hero has the third boss, The Hunter, whose hounds are sentient black holes that destroy other galaxies.
• According to the plans shown in the Long-Fall Boot video, the dual portal device from Portal contains a miniature black hole. As well as two miniature German potato-masher grenades intended to restart the black hole if it should evaporate, and a circular slide rule to determine how far away you should run if the black hole starts expanding. You have to take the portal gun apart to get to it. We should note here that the person who explains this is Aperture CEO Cave Johnson, and as he is known to be a blithering idiot this may not actually be the case.
• Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance have the last boss fight, against Deimos and Phobos, where upon defeat both the evil gods are then sucked into a black hole. That somehow doesn't affect you for reasons unknown.
• In Go Beryllium!, you have to dodge Hawking radiation until the thing evaporates. It's the size of an atom, but then again, so are you...
• MDK2: Kurt Hectic's rarest and deadliest weapon is the Black Hole Grenade. All enemies nearby (except bosses) will be sucked in and annihilated — and so will Kurt, if you don't run the other way as soon as you toss it.
• Mega Man:
  • Mega Man gets the Black Hole Bomb in 9. If those were real black holes, then Earth would get destroyed. And it wouldn't be sealed up by concrete.
  • Saturn in the Game Boy Mega Man V provides the Black Hole weapon. It forms above Mega Man's head, sucks in weak enemies, and then spits out debris.
  • Mega Man X8 has the Squeeze Bomb weapon, obtainable from Gravity Antonion, who has gravity itself at his command. It creates a slowly-moving black hole that pulls in smaller enemies and can break through crystals, especially those created by Earthrock Trilobite.
  • The Gravity Well weapon is obtained in X3 from Gravity Beetle. The normal shot makes a localized high-gravity area to crush enemies, while the charged version launches a more powerful version off the top of the screen and is strong enough to drag enemies away.
  • Mega Man Star Force 3: Black Ace has an exclusive card called Black End Galaxy, only usable as Black Ace. It involves creating a black hole where the enemy is, then quickly slicing through it, causing the black hole and enemy inside to blow up.
• The Obscura Experiment: The Big Bad of the game is the Dark Matter, which is a roughly person-sized black hole that moves around the ship. It only sucks in anyone who gets too close to it.
• Not to be outdone, Ratchet weaponizes the things in Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, and his black holes can suck each other up, making even bigger ones! But there is a limit.
  • For bonus points, the weapon appears again as the "Rift Inducer 5000" in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, though this time the black hole contains an Eldritch Abomination with Combat Tentacles named "Fred", who "enjoys moonlight strolls along the beach, reading and mauling unsuspecting enemies with brutal efficiency." When upgraded into the Rift Ripper 5000, the black hole explodes due to the manufacturers "removing the horizon stabilizer". Rule of Cool and Rule of Fun are in full effect here.
  • And in Ratchet & Clank: Into the Nexus, a similar weapon makes appearance. Unlike the original, this one can't suck up enemies for an insta-kill (at first...), instead merely drawing enemies together and stunning them. It's upgraded version however can, and unlike above-mentioned weapon, it works on bosses.
  • In a non-destructive example, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction has the duo taking a "shortcut" through one to escape a band of Space Pirates.
  Clank: Oh dear. Why must we always choose between certain death and probable death?
• SAR: Search and Rescue have a portable mini-black hole as one of it's power-ups, which sucks in all mook enemies onscreen banishing them to another dimension. Forever. It doesn't affect the player (or players in two-player mode) and larger enemies can escape from it, unless you shoot them and cause them to fall. Unfortunately, bosses (all of them) are too large to be affected by this attack.
• In ShellShock Live, black holes occasionally appear on the map, with event horizons of varying sizes. Projectiles that enter the event horizon will be curved off course, while anything that actually goes into the black hole is absorbed.
• In Unreal Tournament 2004, one of the more interesting weapons of the Chaos UT mod is a "Gravity Vortex". Any players nearby are sucked into it and will die, regardless of health, and armor. The unrealistic part is it does not affect any ammunition shot near the vortex.
• The Unreal 4 Ever mod for Unreal Tournament featured a weapon called the "Quantum Singularity Generator" which would generate an unrealistic black hole on whatever surface (or opponent) it hit drawing in and tearing opponents (and you if you're too close) to pieces. Also confused with wormholes as if you generated a second one any Ludicrous Gibs that went into one would come out the other. (You could use it to teleport yourself but you would lose a lot of health at best and at worst also become Ludicrous Gibs yourself.)
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Galaxy:
    • The black holes that function as bottomless pits for each level. There are only two realistic things to them: they suck and they red-shift.
    • Bowser's plans go bust, one of his stars collapses and turns into a black hole, universe gets sucked in? Disregarding the fact that it's actually possible to fight inside said star without dying painfully, black holes... just don't work that way.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2: Bowser somehow manages to top himself by roaring a black hole to existence for the final battle. After taking enough punishment, he admits defeat and is swallowed by the black hole, closing it. Not to worry, though, Bowser shows up again in the credits, and he's tiny! (and mad!)
  • Mario Party 6: The aptly-named minigame Black Hole Boogie features two dueling characters close to a black hole that begins to drag them and is already swallowing meteors. The objective of the minigame is to mash A in order to swim away from a black hole. The loser gets sucked in, but then the black hole disappears, and they can be seen floating across the screen in the background after the minigame has ended. In case both players get sucked in at the same time, the minigame ends in a tie.
  • The Void from Super Paper Mario is somewhat of a subversion: It eventually sucks up everything in the multiverse. Black holes aren't interdimensional, and they aren't cosmic vacuums; they just suck up anything that's too close. Also, there's a castle in it.
• The black holes in Spore. They're covered in lightning, you can fly right up to them and, with the right upgrade, through them and out another black hole. Another wormhole confusion example.
• Star Ocean:
  • Maria's Gravity Bullet in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time.
  • Bacchus' Black Hole Sphere in Star Ocean: The Last Hope. A black hole that inexplicably appears directly in the path of the ship mid-warp, sucks it in and spits it out in an alternate universe, completely intact.
• You can create a black hole in Scribblenauts. It sucks in everything within a certain radius and destroys anything that touches it. And it evaporates after a few seconds. That's actually fairly realistic, if you're willing to fudge the masses and timescales by several orders of magnitude. Although it really should evaporate in a very loud BANG, to be strictly accurate. And in the sequel, spawning a black hole causes it to suck up any nearby objects for a few seconds. When the few seconds are up, it expands and consumes the entire stage, protagonist included. And it cannot be removed once spawned.
• Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has them in a few boss battles. In one, it's the result of the Dark Star's defeat and does huge damage if you don't mash A and B to make Mario and Luigi run away, while in the final Giant Bowser battle, the mech form of Princess Peach's Castle has a cannon that fires them, with you having to keep sliding the stylus across the touch screen to make Bowser launch himself back out of them when caught (and the final part of the battle has both sides stuck in black holes on different sides of the arena).
• Super Smash Bros.:
  • The boss Crazy Hand has had two different moves involving this. In Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U, he can rip open a rift in space to reveal a black hole, sucking you if you get in. In Ultimate, he gets a new one where he throws a small black hole that would chase your fighter around the arena.
  • Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: There's a black hole that serves as an item. It pulls in nearby fighters, but then releases them, doing absolutely no damage. You can also pick one up and throw it like it was a rock.
• Super Robot Wars: SRW2-4, the Alpha games and by extension the entirety of Super Robot Wars: Original Generation and it's sequels is built on this trope. The robots used by many of the Original Generation characters use engines powered by black holes and major antagonist Shu Shirakawa's Neo Granzon attacks by creating black holes.
• Bomberman 64: The Second Attack!. Where to begin. The big bad uses one to suck in planets and store his army and sustains it with gravity generators located on captured planets INSIDE the black hole and his interstellar warship (also inside the black hole). Then there's Bulzeeb. He attacks with black hole bombs which are, as you may have guessed, bombs that create a large (compared to most explosions in the game) black hole upon detonation. The black hole only compresses anything in its blast radius that's not the ground. And apparently Bulzeeb's armor is black hole proof since he can enter the black hole without being compressed or harmed. To give the game credit, at least they show death by compression into a singularity when it does hit you.
• The instructions for Crystal Crazy describe black holes as "rifts in the space-time continuum that instantly transport you from one place to another. Actually the time bit isn't really correct. Neither is the continuum bit. Or the rift. But it sounded good."
• Lampshaded in Empire at War - Forces of Corruption. The map description for the Maw - a black hole cluster which has no effect on in-game spacecraft - claims the following:
  Conjecture arose as to whether the Maw could have occurred naturally or was built by a vastly powerful ancient race.
• The Geometry Wars games feature Gravity Wells, a semi-sentient enemy that drifts benignly towards you, doing absolutely nothing. If attacked, it burns brightly, and starts drawing in everything nearby (to add to their mass), sometimes allowing them to orbit it. The gravity increases with the size of the Well. The only way to end the Wells is to shoot them to chip their mass away. And the gravity multiplies if multiple Gravity Wells are allowed to try to engulf each other (they just dance around each other), to the point your craft cannot escape the pull. Oddly, Gravity Wells will split and repel your firepower, meaning you have to draw close, shoot, and use the gravity to slingshot yourself to safety.
• In the Interactive Fiction game Gateway II: Homeworld (loosely based on Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga), the Heechee have hidden away from the Assassins inside a black hole. The only way to get through it is with a specially-modified Heechee ship that can survive entering a singularity. The game even goes so far as to describe the devices that allow that to happen.
• In Star Trek: Armada, black holes are just background objects, unless a ship's engines are disabled. Then they start to fall in and can be destroyed. No time dilation though.
• In Star Trek: Starfleet Command, black holes are blue whirlpools that suck in your starship if its engines aren't strong enough to escape.
• In Conquest: Frontier Wars, black holes suck in ships that get too close and may either destroy them or throw them to the other edge of the map. Must be one big slingshot. Used as a plot point in the campaign.
• In Haegemonia: Legions of Iron, black holes are giant shiny funnels in space that sound like a twister. Getting close to them is not recommended. They show up rarely though. And when they do, they continuously damage every ship in a large radius (probably because real-life black holes are major radiation hazards). In the only campaign mission where one shows up, the player's second in command warns that "our larger ships are already having trouble keeping themselves away from it". What is unrealistic is that there is a pair of nebulae barely a single AU away from the black hole; how they managed to avoid being sucked in is a mystery. Another unrealism is the fact that the accretion disc is VERY fast when it should be very slow due to relativistic time dilation.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • The End of the World level of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) features black and purple spheres that suck everything towards them and kill you if you touch them. They also resemble the Eye of Sauron!
  • In Sonic Colors, Sonic can become one by harnessing the power of the violet wisps. And one is created after the defeat of the final boss. The final level is Sonic trying to escape it. He fails around the 31 second mark, though thankfully the Wisps do manage to bail him out.
  • Sonic Forces has the Violet Wispon, a weapon that can shoot mini-black holes to suck in enemies and rings.
• Star Fox has the black hole level which is the loop of wandering in a space junkyard filled with boxes and broken Arwings floating around until you find one of the three warp spots which sends you somewhere else.
• StarCraft II has this as a protoss ability. It hovers above the ground, sucking in grid lines and mathematical formulae, and everything within range is stretched out and pulled in... until the black hole finally explodes and the units emerge unharmed. In fact, when one is used on your army, the correct strategy is to order all your other units into the black hole as well so the enemy cannot easily destroy them while your main force is gone. As a bit of further explanation how this odd effect came about, the original revealed Black Hole ability did in fact destroy the units. However, it was probably changed for balance reasons (and renamed to Vortex), but the graphics were not changed.
• In the Touhou Project fighting game Touhou Suimusou ~ Immaterial and Missing Power, boss Suika Ibuki creates black holes using her ability to manipulate density. They can draw in the player character but do not damage the terrain and are not instantly lethal.
• In the Mass Effect series, the Blackstorm Projector is colloquially called the "black-hole gun" (and the nickname was Played for Laughs in the Gamestop advert for it), but it in fact fires a particle encased in a high-powered mass effect field, which elevates it to colossal mass, thus creating a gravitational singularity. Also, the Singularity biotic power does not actually suck in enemies, but causes them to levitate and slowly orbit the object. It has no effect on anything else and can safely be thrown at one's own feet.
  • In Mass Effect: Andromeda, the Heleus Cluster that the game takes place in has a black hole (named "Ketos", at least by the humans) at its gravitational center. In terms of appearance and behavior, it's very accurate... except for the fact that the Codex gives Ketos a mass of 12 Solar masses, while the black hole shown in-game on the galaxy map and cutscenes looks far too enormous for such a "low" mass; it looks as big across as an intermediate- or even supermassive-type black hole.
• Final Fantasy V had the Void, an Unrealistic Black Hole sealed inside the Interdimensional Rift.
• The Call of Duty: Zombies map "Ascension" introduces the Gersh Device, a small cylindrical device that fills the grenade slot. Press a few buttons, throw it down, and it generates a small black hole which sucks in all nearby zombies and which closes within a short period of time. Realistically the entire facility the character was on would have been sucked into, but thankfully this mode doesn’t rely too much on realism. What makes it even stranger is that the creator of the device notes that it was meant to be a portable teleporter which is proven if the player decides to jump into the black hole as it will teleport them to a random part of the map. So, as to whether it's a black hole or wormhole is up for debate.
• X-COM Interceptor has semi-realistic black holes that can adversely affect travel on the interstellar map. They can suck in probes (and do so from a surprising distance away) and ships traveling near them are slowed by a significant amount as they try to escape the event horizon. The plot itself is set off by the discovery of an intercepted alien message that shows massive fleets flying into a black hole. It's initially suspected this is some kind of bizarre disposal method, but eventually it's discovered that the aliens have figured out a way to turn black holes into wormholes to a Pocket Dimension where they are building an indestructible superweapon. The rest of the game turns into a race against time to find a way to counter the superweapon.
• In Sheep, Dog 'n' Wolf, you encounter these during the last level. They start sucking you in as soon as you get close, and you can die if you let them actually suck you in. However, you can easily get away from them by just air-swimming in an opposite direction. They are actually necessary to get back to the ground in the Gravity Screw section.
• At the end of Space Quest III: The Pirates of Pestulon, Roger Wilco's ship is sucked into "Black Hole Bertha" and sent into a parallel universe (or perhaps the same universe, but farther back in time) to wind up on Earth in 1989 at the Sierra offices. No physical harm is done to Roger or the Two Guys from Andromeda.
  • And when the 4th game begins, he seems to have gone back through the black hole to the planet Magmetheus.
• Putty has a black hole that tries to suck up Bots. The player character can mold itself into it, and use it to get rid of a pesky Flying Saucer.
• No Man's Sky features one at the center of the game's universe, which is fine and dandy... except that it serves as game's final destination, and as such means that players are expected to eventually get to it.
• Darius Gaiden has the "Black Hole Bomber" Smart Bomb, which sucks enemies into its circle before emitting a shockwave damaging all enemies on screen.
• Space Station 13 is powered by one of these on most servers, and letting it loose to devour the station is a tried, tested and time-honoured traitor tactic.
• The "Space Cadet" table of Full Tilt! Pinball has a kickout called "Black Hole" (oddly enough it's white). There's also a mission ("Black Hole Mission") where you've to lit all the engine lights and send the ball to the "black hole". When you accomplish it, you get the message "Black Hole eliminated".
• Both invoked and partially subverted in one old text-based game, that appeared in a book of computer games in BASIC language, named Starbase 2000^note A game similar to Star Trek Text Game, as two of the events you could experiment on it. In the first case your ship was hit by X-Rays emitted by a black hole, sending you at random to a close point of the map. In the second one the hole appeared complete with gravitational lensing, and sent your ship to the opposite part of the map. Played straight in another game that appeared in the same book, Quest for Riemannian, with a black hole sucking your ship and giving a Game Over complete with a Lost in Transmission.
• In The King of Fighters, both Zero and Clone Zero summon one for their White Destroyer Spirit DM. Oddly, it doesn't even suck the opponent in; it deals damage via Sucking-In Lines that send them flying away from it.
• Kingdom Hearts averts this with The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, which looks exactly how a Black Hole should look. It's very fitting considering the nature of the world...
• Defense of the Ancients and Dota 2 has Enigma, whose ultimate ability, 'Black Hole', summons a vortex that hovers above the ground, sucking in every enemy (but not allies or terrain) in a very small area until it disappears or Enigma stops channeling. Lore wise it is described as having the power to end worlds.
  • In a recent patch they tried to make it slightly more realistic by having enemies rotate around the center.
• Saints Row IV has the Black Hole Launcher (aka the "Singularity Gun") with significantly reduced effectiveness than what a real black hole launcher would have, for gameplay purposes of course.
• Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon: Black Holes appear on several maps as hazards, usually in the centre of the map. Black Holes will pull any nearby object into its event horizon, destroying anything that reaches the event horizon.
• In Stick Fight, one gun's projectile creates an ever-expanding black hole once it touches something or goes off the screen, sucking everything nearby into it as it grows.
• Sunless Skies: Wells act the part, as great black holes in reality that constantly swallow the air, creating a massive hurricane-esque windstorm that threatens to swallow locomotives that come close. Usually surrounded by ravaged settlements, too. Justified, however, in that space in Sunless Skies is quite different from what we know; Wells aren't really black holes, they're just holes in reality where the Judgements lock up entities they don't want running around, but cannot eliminate for one reason or another.
• In Cthulhu Saves the World, an animate black hole, aptly named Black Hole, appears as a boss in one of optional dungeons, guarding the strongest armor item for one of the party members. It's subjectable to physical and magical attacks and can even be Driven to Madness (much like everything else in the game, which is expectable, given the protagonist)!
• Destroy All Humans! has the Black Hole Gun, the last handheld weapon unlocked in Path of the Furon. The player can charge the gun at a spot to develop a black hole, which will then proceed to suck in absolutely everything around it. People, cars and debris will be absorbed into it while it is active before the hole spews out the brains of its victims before dissipating, making it handy as a way to get yourself out of a tight situation and to collect plenty of DNA if you're short on currency. The only enemy that's able to resist its pull are the Nexo Warriors.
• Marx, the final boss of Kirby Super Star, has an attack where he splits in half and creates a black hole that tries to suck you in. If you get caught in it the black hole will deal considerable damage and then spit you out. This attack would become something of a trend in the series as several later Kirby final bosses use their own variations on it. Marx also uses this attack in his appearance as a boss in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
  • You can even use it yourself when playing as Marx in Kirby Star Allies. The fellow final boss Magolor also uses his own version in his playable moveset. It's ridiculously powerful on both characters.
• In Everspace, black holes or singularities are environmental hazards with its own gravitational pull that instantly kills you if you get sucked in. The only particularly weird thing about it is that its gravity radius is tiny and rather weak, reaching only a few kilometers. There also tends to be bits of collectable dark matter floating around them.
• Event Horizon is yet another game which demonstrates that Gravity Sucks by making black holes pull lighter ships and other objects much faster than heavy ones.^note Gravity, unlike suction, acts proportionally to the target's mass, meaning the heavier ones should go faster. It makes sense from the point of Competitive Balance though, as it counters the light ship's generally faster movement speed and also makes black hole launcher useful as an anti-drone weapon.
• Magicka features the Vortex magick, which takes form of a purple vortex reminiscent of a classical depiction of a black hole. It sucks anything into itself, immediately exploding anyone who got sucked into it into Ludicrous Gibs. It's primarily used by Assatur, the King in Yellow himself, during the final boss fight, and after his defeat, you immediately learn how to cast Vortex for yourself.
• Disgaea 2 has its depiction of the "Big Bang" fist skill — in comparison to the first game's Hurl It into the Sun animation, this game has the user punch hard enough to suck up to nine enemies into a small singularity... which then explodes, dealing Fire-element damage. Disgaea 5 takes this up several notches, with one punch causing a black hole that devours the whole Solar System before exploding with Star-element damage to the target(s).
• In Noita, the Black Hole spell launches a projectile that erases all terrain, but does not directly affect living creatures in any way. The Giga Black Hole creates something closer to a point singularity while the Omega Black Hole creates a massive projectile, both of which deal incredible damage to terrain and enemies.
• App game Solar Smash has black holes under the System Smash option in the menu. They're useful for making the sun go nova, but they don't work if you don't have them close enough, and they expire after a short time.
• Listen, the black hole grenade from The Persistence lives up to its name when it shred enemies apart, but it should also destroy the whole ship if it's deserving of the name.
• REAVER's red shotgun's Secondary Fire produces a black hole that sucks in all the lightweight enemies, leaving them vulnerable to follow-up attacks.
• Grey Area (2023): Tiny black holes occasionally show up starting in Chapter 3. Space-time curves around them, and although crossing the event horizon means instant death, you can make use of their gravitational pull to slingshot yourself around.

Web Comics

• Bob and George: The attack of the Black Hole; it does not affect its creator. Though it does create gravitational lensing.
• In Katamari, this is Discussed when Odeko calls a rip in space a 'black hole'. Ichigo protests, saying their brainiac should know better; he clarifies that this isn't a 'black hole', but a 'hole that is black':
  Odeko: An opening to a completely dark space where the absence of hue would draw in any nearby color. You know. Science.
• Lampshaded in Mob Psycho 100, where Ishiguro, leader of the 7th division of Claw, has a psychic technique he says allows him to produce black holes. As Reigen points out, they don't behave like actual black holes at all and his insistence on pretending that they are only serves to emphasize his childishness.
• Played for Laughs in xkcd. Black Hat Guy has a miniature black hole on his table. It really brings the room together.

Web Original

• SCP Foundation:
  • SCP-094 is an In-Universe one (measuring 1.6 meters across), and a pretty scary one too. (Nothing it touches seems to ever return. Worse, it doubles in size every 31 years.)
  • SCP-2249 ("The Failed Dreamland") is a Russian hospital that contains a extra-dimensional realm filled with wilting forest plants. The hospital and its forest realm also contain several tiny black hole-like objects (they range from 11 cm to 1.67 m in diameter) that emit gamma radiation; they are designated SCP-2249-2.
• Battle for Dream Island has one as a Recommended Character in BFDI 20, which is like how you'd expect one to behave… Until it is sold by the Announcer due to Budget Cuts.
  • Battle for BFDI has another sentient one as a contestant. At first he was normal-sized, but was shrunk by Four in BFB 1. The only way to kill him is with the "No Flyers Allowed" button that Four used.
• In the League of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions the first Spidermobile was lost in one that later turned out to be the home of the evil X-CwX.
• SF Debris lambastes Star Trek: Voyager's version of this from "Parallax" in his review, noting that saying you can escape a black hole's event horizon by punching a hole in it is like saying you can punch a hole in the range you can travel on a tank of gas and therefore go further.
• This site calculates that the smallest object possible (based on current knowledge) is a black hole with the mass of a neutrino, the least massive baryon (non-massless particle) known, which would have a schwartzchild radius of about 10^63 meters. The reason it's unrealistic is the Plack Length (about 10^35 meters) is currently thought to be the smallest length possible, although improvements on quantum theory may solve this problem.

Western Animation

• In Transformers, there have been two major black hole occurrences, both falling squarely in this territory:
  • In The Transformers, a black hole sucks in two ships: one that the good guys and bad guys are on, and one to get sucked in before it just to show us the threat is real. That other ship went 'kaboom' before entering. There's plenty of "Oh, noes, we're gonna get squishificated!" talk. And then they go in and... wind up in a color-inverted universe. And rather easily escape.
  • In Transformers: Cybertron, the entire plot revolves around the black hole created by the destruction of Unicron. It had many space and time-bending effects throughout the universe (and the multiverse, if we take All There in the Manual into account.) When you throw dark gods into the mix, you expect it to be a bit different from the mundane version...
• Averted in the Futurama episode "A Flight to Remember". Bender still has some hope that his love interest, after falling through a black hole, may happen to just reappear safe somewhere else. Prof. Farnsworth, however, being a brilliant scientist, after reassuring him by confirming his hypothesis, brutally explains to the others (with an eloquent gesture) that she's dead and gone. And played straight with the black hole itself being depicted as a highly-visible, blue-ish vortex.
• The Justice League Unlimited episode "The Greatest Story Never Told" has a scientist who grows a black hole in his stomach. By the end of the episode, Booster Gold is able to release everything that had been sucked in, completely unharmed.
• An Inverted trait in Voltron: Legendary Defender that features a "White Hole", which basically, is the exact opposite of a black hole, that sucks things out from unknown places.
• One episode of the Superfriends has Wonder Woman, Hawkman and Black Vulcan trapped on an artificial play world built by the Toyman in the center of a black hole (no, they don't explain how he was able to do this). Aside from not being able to escape the black hole, the heroes walk, run, jump and otherwise move perfectly fine. At the end, Superman and Green Lantern fuse into one being to tear a hole in the black hole and allow the others to escape.
• The power of the main villain in LEGO's Hero Factory is creating black holes, using a staff. As if the writer was aiming to play this trope straight as best as she could, they are actual holes you can jump into, and... cling onto their inner "walls". Even though the wall was intangible and characters simply floated through them in the previous scene. Their sucking power is so immense, they pull the weapons out of the Heroes' hands, but inside, you can freely jump around from wall to wall without falling deeper into it. Another interesting thing is that if you jump upwards into it, you end up on its wall, but if you climb out of it upwards, you will fall out downwards through its "bottom". How can these black holes be neutralized? By throwing anti-gravity flying devices into them.
• Hero Factory's predecessor BIONICLE also played with this. When Nuhvok-Kal, the Bohrok-Kal of Gravity got too powerful for its own good, it turned into a miniature black hole. It didn't suck in anything else, in fact it was never described further. We have to assume the black hole simply evaporated.
• Megas XLR had Coop create a black hole once to defeat a villain, while still in New Jersey. How does Coop get rid of it? By creating another black hole and the two somehow cancel each other out.
• In Squidbillies, Dan Halen ordered his scientists to create a black hole generator with the incredibly dented purpose to dispose a body (and his mother) into it.
• The Tick once battled a race of aliens who planned on destroying the universe by throwing a black hole into ANOTHER black hole. The Tick, being the Tick, ended up having to catch one and throw it away from the other.
  Tick: Must ... defy ... laws of ... physics!
  Arthur: Fight it, Tick! Fight that black hole!
• "John Blackstar, astronaut, is swept through a black hole, into an ancient, alien universe!"
• Johnny Sunspot from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, and one of many black holes he creates using only his Tricked-Out Gloves (which don't really look tricked out). They only pull in who or what he wants them to pull in, and he can decide whether the person or object will be released... or sent into oblivion.
• Dogstar: In "Rockin' in the Flea World", the Dogstar is nearly sucked into a black hole. It is depicted as a giant black sphere hanging in space.
• Spider-Man: The Animated Series: Averted in the case of the portals created by The Spot. Even though they are described in numerous instances to look like black holes, Dr. Connors explains that they lack the supergravity of their "big brothers", making them different.
• During Albert Einstein's fight with Chyna on Celebrity Deathmatch, Einstein fills a normal blender with negative hydrogen ions to create a black hole. Chyna holds onto the ropes as the hole sucks in one of her arms. Einstein then turns off the blender and the black hole disappears.
• The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment "The Greatest Story Ever Holed" had Professor Frink accidentally create a miniature black hole with a particle collider. At first it's harmless, but Homer begins disposing of garbage into it, causing it to slowly expand, and letting others do the same for money. Eventually, the hole sucks in the whole town, except for Maggie, who throws her pacifier at it. The black hole pauses, begins sucking on the pacifier, and flies off into space, leaving the rest of Earth alone. Meanwhile, on the other side of the hole, the rest of Springfield finds themselves on an alien world that has become enamored with the culture they've gleaned from their garbage.
• Played for laughs in Rex the Runt. The gang manage to pilot the entire Earth (which they punctured) into a black hole (which makes bathroom plughole gurgling noises), and find only a rather drab cafeteria at the centre. They call a cab to get them back home again.
• In Wander over Yonder episode The Hole Lotta Nuthin' the black hole is the size of a pinhole, is powerful enough to risk destroying the entire galaxy, but can be plugged harmlessly with a finger, and only a finger.
• In Cyberchase, the Hacker tries to throw the Encryptor Chip with Motherboard inside it into a black hole, which seems to act more like a cosmic garbage dump (justified in that they are in Cyberspace, not the real world). The owner of the Black Hole can even turn it off and make it spit out the chip when Hacker tries to throw it in without paying.

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